There are many settings in which individuals collaborate on ideas, projects, studying, etc. For example, meetings are held in business settings, students get together in classrooms or study sessions, etc. The meeting participants may bring a wide variety of electronic devices to the meeting. For example, a student might take notes on a laptop computer, many in the meeting may have a cellular telephone, or a group leader might use a computer to make a slide presentation. It can be desirable to allow the group members to use their electronic devices to share notes, share ideas, collaborate etc. However, there are numerous challenges with such sharing.
One challenge is to make the sharing process natural and easy. The following example will be used to illustrate some of the problems. A user can download a file from a personal computer to a portable storage device, such as a flash drive, and hand the flash drive to another person, who uploads the file to their computer. This technique suffers from numerous problems. For one, it can be very distracting to be physically passing the flash drive during a meeting. It may not even be practical to pass the device to someone who is on the other side of the room, or to pass the device to each person in the meeting. Also, there are security issues to deal with such as allowing only the desired file on the flash drive to be copied to other computers.
Some techniques provide for shared workspaces that allow users of different computers to collaborate. A shared workspace is an area where users can share documents and information, maintain lists of pertinent data, and keep each other up to date on the status of a group project. In some techniques, the shared workspace is hosted by a web server, which may be convenient when users are at different locations. However, such techniques may not allow users to have different views into the shared workspace.
Some shared workspaces allow the different users to collaborate in real-time. For example, the shared workspace allows a document, spreadsheet, or CAD drawing to be seen and modified by users at different computers. However, some real-time shared workspaces suffer from a limitation that all users see the same view, which may be referred to as “what you see is what I see” or “WYSIWIS.”